An Inclusive Community

We are committed to increasing access to our program for BIPOC students. We offer scholarships and increased funding options for the emerging voices we want to support and read. We listen, learn, and aim build an inclusive community through sustained dialogue and practice.

Inclusion & Equity

We listen, reflect, engage, and facilitate proactive conversations. We read books that reflect world voices.

We cultivate an antiracist and social justice reading list.

We commit to solidarity and action.

Our Office of Diversity and Inclusion is central to our commitment.

Vision Statement for Institutional Pluralism and Inclusion

"The College affirms the intersecting identities of all its community members—students, faculty, staff, and alumni—and recognizes their contributions to the vitality of our unique living and learning environment. The College’s approach to pluralism and inclusivity—both as fields of inquiry and practice—is to prioritize flexible thought, and to invite the examination of access, value, and power through its institutional policies and areas of study."

World Lit Café

Started and run by MFA students, World Lit Café usually takes place during the residency. Students gather and individually select works from global voices to read and then discuss their intellectual and cultural footprint in the world of letters and beyond. This can happen as a lunchtime roundtable or a separate reading at night organized by the students.

RECENT FACULTY & GUESTS

Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem (2007), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize; and Digest (2014), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.”

Peter Balakian is the author of the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir and a New York Times Notable Book and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.

Asali Solomon is an American professor, author, and novelist. Solomon has written two books. Her first, Get Down, was a collection of short stories published in 2008. She published her second book, a novel titled Disgruntled, in 2015.

Saeed Jones' poems engage themes of intimacy, race and power. He has received a Pushcart Prize and has also been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem and Queer/Art/Mentorship. He is the literary editor for BuzzFeed and lives in New York City.

Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer and author of Queen of the Night. Born in Rhode Island, he spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine.

Anaïs Duplan '16 is a curator and poet. She is concerned with the intersections of Internet-based discourse, Black signification, and notions of both the Afrofuture and the Anthropocene.